The cannon—how many? He couldn’t tell, but more than two; the firing kept up at a tremendous rate, the crash of it shaking his bones every half minute or so.
He made himself stop, bend over, hands on his knees, gasping. He thought he heard musket fire, muffled, rhythmic crashes between the cannon blasts. The British army’s disciplined volleys.
“Load!”
“Fire!”
“Fall back!” An officer’s shouts rang out sudden in the heartbeat of silence between one crash and the next.
You’re not a soldier. If you get killed … nobody will be here to help them. Fall back, idiot.
He’d been at the back of the rank, with Marion. But now he was surrounded by men, surging together, pushing, running in all directions. Orders were being barked, and he thought some of the men were struggling to obey; he heard random shouts, saw a black boy who couldn’t be more than twelve struggling grimly to load a musket taller than he was. He wore a dark-blue uniform, and a bright-yellow kerchief showed when the fog parted for an instant.
Roger tripped over someone lying on the ground and landed on his knees, brackish water seeping through his breeches. He’d landed with his hands on the fallen man, and the sudden warmth on his cold fingers was a shock that brought him back to himself.
The man moaned and Roger jerked his hands away, then recovered himself and groped for the man’s hand. It was gone, and his own hand was filled with a gush of hot blood that reeked like a slaughterhouse.
“Jesus,” he said, and, wiping his hand on his breeches, he grappled with the other in his bag, he had cloths … he yanked out something white and tried to tie it round … he felt frantically for a wrist, but that was gone, too. He got a fragment of sleeve and felt his way up it as fast as he could, but he reached the still-solid upper arm a moment after the man died—he could feel the sudden limpness of the body under his hand.
He was still kneeling there with the unused cloth in his hand when someone tripped over him and fell headlong with a tremendous splash. Roger got up onto his feet and duck-walked to the fallen man.
“Are you all right?” he shouted, bending forward. Something whistled over his head, and he threw himself flat on top of the man.
“Jesus Christ!” the man exclaimed, punching wildly at Roger. “Get the devil off me, you bugger!”
They wrestled in the mud and water for a moment, each trying to use the other for leverage to rise, and the cannon kept on firing. Roger pushed the man away and managed to roll up onto his knees in the mud. Cries for help were coming from behind him, and he turned in that direction.
The fog was almost gone, driven off by explosions, but the gun smoke drifted white and low across the uneven ground, showing him brief flashes of color and movement as it shredded.
“Help, help me!”
He saw the man then, on hands and knees, dragging one leg, and he splashed through the puddles to reach him. Not much blood, but the leg was clearly wounded; he got a shoulder under the man’s arm and got him on his feet, hustled him as fast as possible away from the redoubt, out of range …
The air shattered again and the earth seemed to tilt under him; he was lying on the ground with the man he’d been helping on top of him, the man’s jaw knocked away and hot blood and chunks of teeth soaking into his chest. Panicked, he struggled out from under the twitching body—Oh, God, oh, God, he was still alive—and then he was kneeling by the man, slipping in the mud, catching himself with a hand on the chest where he could feel the heart beating in time with the blood spurting, Oh, Jesus, help me!
He groped for words, frantic. It was all gone. All the comforting words he’d gleaned, all his stockin-trade …
“You’re not alone,” he panted, pressing hard on the heaving chest, as though he could anchor the man to the earth he was dissolving into. “I’m here. I won’t leave you. It’s gonna be all right. You’re gonna be all right.” He kept repeating that, kept his hands pressing hard, and then, in the midst of the spouting carnage, felt the life leave the body.
Just … gone.
He sat on his heels, gasping, frozen in place, one hand on the still body as though it were glued there, and then the drums.
A faint throb through the rhythmic sounds of gunfire. His bones had absorbed that without his noticing; he could feel the ebb when the first rank of muskets fell back and the surge when the second rank reached the edge of the redoubt and fired. Something in the back of his head was counting … one … two …